Want to know how to cross the tightrope? Start walking.

Above: Annette Hobhouse: MPS is supported by a huge investment in coaching and skills development because it is understood that this is what it takes to get the culture right company-wide.

MD Annette Hobhouse has had the helm of Meggitt Avionics (MAV) for a year. Understandably, she is quick to sound a note of caution. But she looks and sounds like a woman who is enjoying every minute. “People are right to be excited. It’s still very early days but we’ve already seen some very useful gains from MPS.”

Ask questions until good answers emerge

Lean on me

That “we” is instructive. It is not the royal ‘We’. She is referring to everyone. For leaders like Hobhouse the strict hierarchies and big sticks of old-fashioned command and control are gone. Influence is the new power. Success for an MPS manager lies in ‘setting others up to win’.

“My day has more in common with a head coach than an old-style MD. I’m frequently out of my office, getting around the operation— supporting, developing, guiding and trying to make sure good work is always recognised and rewarded. Making it easier for people to co-operate and collaborate across the old boundaries is also very important. That means creating common objectives and priorities for the business and then making sure that everyone is lined-up behind them.”

Everyone in to bat

With two decades of Lean implementations and consulting behind her, Hobhouse could write a book about what’s special in MPS. In fact, she sums it up in a single word: “Culture.” Like many managers of her generation, she spent a long time puzzled by why so few Lean benefits seemed to stick. The penny dropped when she was Head of Operations at AgustaWestland. “A Lean consultant we hired named Sid Joynson—a great guy—helped me to see that Lean isn’t about tools, it’s about people. For Lean practices to take root, you have to get the culture right first. If you try to ‘do Lean’ with command and control managers who don’t believe in it, the benefits never last.”

Which is precisely what sets MPS apart. “MPS is being done properly. It’s being led by example, right from the top, by people who are fully committed. It’s being implemented by Meggitt’s own experts, not consultants. And it’s all supported by a huge investment in coaching and skills development because it is understood that this is what it takes to get the culture right company-wide.”

When Chief Executive Stephen Young decided to earn his Lean Yellow Belt (Meggitt’s first), he came to MAV to do it. Young’s determination to lead by example now finds its echo throughout MAV. Even though the morning Focus Factory meeting could proceed without Hobhouse, she makes sure it never has to. “It would be wrong,” she says firmly. “If senior managers don’t lead by example these things soon fall apart. If I miss a meeting people assume that the things I said were important last week aren’t important anymore. And what’s true for me is true for every manager and team leader at every level. Jack Welch [CEO of GE, 1981-2001] was a great hero of mine. He used to say, ‘To succeed you need everyone in to bat’.”

Managers should coach, not ‘fix’

Coaching is the mainspring of that MPS workplace vision in which everyone is ‘set up to win’. Hobhouse appreciates that the new ‘soft’ skills may not come naturally to some—perhaps especially after a lifetime of commanding and controlling. But she firmly believes that almost everyone can learn to do it well and, furthermore, that, “It is every manager’s duty to think about how best to bring on the next generation.”

Hobhouse’s favourite coaching mantra is ‘Ask questions until good answers emerge’. But the real key to good coaching lies in the kind of questions you ask, she says. “Say you are a tennis coach and your pupil is missing too many balls. ‘Are you watching the ball?’ you say. The pupil is likely to reply defensively—‘Yes, of course I am’—because the question implies that they are doing something wrong. A much better question would have been, ‘So, was the ball spinning when it came across the net?’. Now the player has to adopt the desired behaviour to answer the question properly. By simply changing the way you framed the question you have helped the pupil understand the problem, changed his behaviour and improved his play. All without any undertone of blaming, intended or not.”

The same is true in the workplace. “If your manager just fixes your problem for you, you are none the wiser. But if she uses questioning to guide you to discover the answer for yourself—‘How often have we seen this? What are the most likely causes? How can you work out the root cause? What containment action is needed? What corrective action? How can we verify that it has worked?’—then you understand the thing better because you have had to think it through, your confidence is higher because it was you who solved it and she has shown you, with her own behaviour, how you might coach others. In MPS, everyone can be a coach and everyone should be a coach—just as everyone, at every level, can benefit from coaching.”

Less ‘planning’, more doing

Getting people off the starting blocks more quickly is an important part of coaching. Here too, command and control has a lot to answer for, says Hobhouse. The person who is ‘stuck’ is often nothing of the sort. They are simply waiting for permission to act—permission they probably shouldn’t need. Or they have become bogged down in a ‘planning’ process which was always pointless. There is, she notes, a very fine line between planning and procrastination.

Where there are problems, they are almost always the product of bad management or bad processes

“I remember a management training course in Hong Kong. I was with a group of very senior managers and we all had to walk across a tightrope with a bucket of water. We had half an hour to do it, that’s all. They immediately started ‘planning’ their ‘solution’! I turned to the invigilator and said, “If we fall off, is there a penalty?” “No,” he said. So I said to the guys, “Listen. I know I can walk this tightrope. You follow me. If we fall off we can start again but we are much more likely to get the hang of it if we get on and try.”

An important part of MPS implementation is about breaking down these old instincts for delay and inertia. So, if you are the kind of person who thinks they can’t start a DLA process until your KPI definitions are just so, or a new whiteboard arrives from site services, or your boss gives you permission for your DLA kick-off meeting, then Hobhouse has some succinct advice for you: “Just get on with it!”

Her own fondness for have-a-go problem-solving she puts down to a love of maths. “With maths it doesn’t matter if you don’t get it right first time. You can always go back and start again— you know there will be a solution, it’s just a question of finding it. No part of MPS is about waiting for someone to tell you to do something you already know needs doing. It’s about getting on with it. You succeed by experimenting, not by sitting back and waiting.”

An end to conflicting objectives

The much talked about silo-busting power of MPS is a source of particular pleasure to Hobhouse. She secretly dreams of a completely boundary-less organisation: “I don’t believe in boundaries. I believe there are jobs that need doing and a big pool of talented people to do them. We should all muck in and get them done.” But for the time-being she will settle for developing a company that finds it much more natural to co-operate and collaborate internally.

Operational alignment is, then, a very high priority. From simple admin slip-ups to departments barely on speaking terms, many common operational problems are caused by nothing more than clashing priorities, says Hobhouse. “Without operational alignment, one team’s priorities can easily be another’s paralysing resource crisis. What if Commercial is facing an important tender deadline but Procurement is too busy chasing component shortages to provide prices? The result is a disaster for the business with serious consequences for everyone.”

See the processes, not the functions

In breaking down this kind of old-style, silo-based thinking, DLA is more than living up to its promise. Every morning representatives from all business functions come together to focus on what Hobhouse calls the great end-to-end processes. Things like ‘order capture’ and ‘product realisation’. “These, not the functions, are the real muscles of a business,” she says. “Value stream maps help us understand which activities add power to our processes. Then, in everyone who touches that process, at every level, we need to encourage a healthy obsession with improving it.”

The saying ‘accept only good work—do only good work—pass-on only good work.’ (another of Hobhouse’s favourites) sums up what she means. “How often do we receive less than perfect work from a colleague, say nothing and sort it out ourselves? Why aren’t we up-front about the problem? No-one should have to re-do somebody else’s work. And we should be able to support our colleagues with this kind of feedback. Done properly, this isn’t blaming, it’s coaching.”

Problems are never personal

Talking to Hobhouse at length, her faith in her staff seems unshakable. “99% of our people are great and want to do a good job. If we want them to change and develop, take on new roles, acquire new skills, do things differently, I know they will. We just have to give them the support and encouragement they need.”

Where there are problems, they are almost always the product of bad management or bad processes, she says. “You know, every time something goes wrong you can probably say that the root cause is something we managers have failed to do to enable the process to work properly in the first place. Are the induction, assessment, coaching, training or staff development processes working as they should? Or has a problem with the physical process allowed this thing to happen? The Japanese would say it should have been ‘poka-yoked’—made fool-proof— and it’s our job as managers to ensure that happens.”

Beyond production

MPS will, in time, morph into MBS, the Meggitt Business System. That day can’t come soon enough for MAV. “We looked beyond product realisation almost from the very start. Processes like business capture and product design and certification are already adapting MPS for their own areas. Daily stand-up meetings, living paretos and many other tools besides are being used all over the business.”

The business logic was inescapable. “If we hadn’t tried to get the same thinking right across the whole organisation, then the cultural change wouldn’t have been broad-based enough for MPS to focus on those big, multi-functional, end-to-end processes. We’d have ended up with Production thinking they were badly supported by Engineering and Commercial simply because they were dancing to different beats. By getting everyone thinking along MPS lines as early as possible, it has made it much easier to get DLA and the Focus Factory process delivering results quickly for everyone.” ■